This week’s Entertainment Weekly has some 75% human, 25% alien eye candy on the cover. I’m pretty impressed with how much Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto look like Shatner and Nimoy. But can they act? That will be the question. An even larger question is this: Can J.J. Abrams bring back Teh Cool?

Star Trek now is beloved for its goofy costumes, low-budget sets and props, and swinging sixties romance. I enjoy the show for all of those reasons, but often see how much modern minds overlook the important social impact the show had. Gene Roddenberry really pushed the envelope for what you could and could not do on television, and you could easily argue that Star Trek played a major role in legitimizing the civil rights movement from a pop culture angle.

While NBC’s network executives took the edge off of Roddenberry’s vision of a sexism- and racism-free society (by axing characters like Number One, prohibiting female characters from having too much authority, and dressing them in miniskirts instead of trousers), plenty of social messages still got past the suits in the corner office. Women may have been second-class citizens, but at least they were there; and that is something, especially considering that the most prominent female crew member was also black. Most schools were not yet integrated, and Loving v. Virginia was still a year off. T. C. Williams High School wouldn’t integrate until 1971.

Uhura may not have been the true display of equality that civil rights activists longed for, but her presence kept the door open. Nichelle Nichols, the actress who portrayed Uhura, nearly quit after the first season because she felt her role was unimportant. But Martin Luther King encouraged her to stay on, as she was a critically important role model for women and black children. She stuck with it and the role earned fame as a capable, intelligent, and valuable officer who happened to be black and female, not the other way around. In general Star Trek did a lot more for race relations than it did for sexism; don’t even get me started on Yeoman Rand. But this trend doesn’t seem like a surprise; polls related to the current election show that America is still much more sexist than it is racist.

After the integration, the exploration, and the first onscreen interracial kiss, somewhere Star Trek started to lose its cool. It became about technical readouts and conventions and pointy ears, which is okay, I suppose, but sucks out what made the show really worthwhile. I’m hoping J.J. Abrams can be tapped to go where no one has gone before.

I’m very happy the reincarnation is being done as a movie and not as a TV series. As MonkeyBot always says, Abrams makes great TV . . . until halfway through Season 2. But making movies forces him to focus and he isn’t allowed to let interesting plot threads just drift off into the ether. The temporal requirements of filmmaking made Cloverfield a lot of fun to watch. Had it been a TV show, it would have rocked for about a season and then drifted off into boring, torturous, and convoluted mediocrity, the way Lost did.

Culturally, humans seem to have possibly turned a corner in the last year or two. The U.S. Presidental election is notable proof of that. In no election previously would you have seen such religious, ethnic, and gender diversity. Joe Biden: Irish. Hillary Clinton: Woman. Christopher Dodd: Irish Catholic. Rudi Giuliani: Italian Catholic. Mike Gravel: Catholic Québécois. Dennis John Kucinich: Croatian. Barack Obama: Biracial. Bill Richardson: Hispanic. Mitt Romney: Mormon. There has never been such diversity in a presidential campaign, and the presence of so many people of historically marginalized groups shows that when Star Trek launches this time, it will be in a world that is fully prepared for real discussions about equality.

Roddenberry was one of a kind, and it’s hard to say if Star Trek could be cool again. Good luck, Abrams. The fate of humanity is on your shoulders.